Visa announced that the company participated in the recent LIFT Challenge to explore blockchain-based applications for Brazil’s central bank-issued digital currency (CBDC), the Real Digital.
The company was one of nine finalists tasked to explore the applications, the Visa press release said. Visa said it created a programmable finance platform for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) such as farmers. It is designed to create better access to global capital markets and facilitate interoperability between currencies, create growth opportunities and improve operations, Visa said.
“Small businesses are essential contributors to our local economies, such as in Brazil where they employ over half the population and contribute to nearly a third of the country’s GDP,” said Catherine Gu, Global Head of CBDC for Visa, the release said. "At Visa, we are committed to help them grow, exploring new technologies that will empower them to more easily maintain and expand their business operations.”
The platform aims to enhance SMEs' access to global capital markets, facilitate currency interoperability, streamline operational processes, and discover new growth opportunities.
By providing local farmers with timely access to a global investor pool, Visa's prototype platform enables optimal price discovery for their products. The LIFT Challenge Real Digital focused on identifying innovative technological research projects within the financial sector to explore use cases for Brazil's Digital Real currency.
“Brazil is one of the world’s leading markets for innovation,” Gu said. “By contributing our expertise, scale, network, and cutting-edge technologies in this market, we are able to help advance real-world applications of digital currencies — in this case making it possible for a soybean farmer to create and globally auction a tokenized contract on a permissioned version of the Ethereum blockchain, while utilizing different forms of money and interoperating between them.”
Visa partnered with Agrotoken, Microsoft and Sinquia, the press release said.
“Agrotoken has a mission to democratize agribusiness by making transactions with soy and corn more accessible. To achieve this, we have chosen solid partners, such as Visa, to join us in our journey towards this goal," said Anderson Nacaxe, Director of Agrotoken in Brazil, in the press release.